If you were an editor - how you might choose the PEN/O.Henry winners

If you're an editor of a magazine or even more so if you're an editor of an anthology of the best stories from all the (American & Canadian) magazines, i.e., if your Laura Furman editing the "PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories 2010," you will inevitably be overwhelmed and stupefied by the similarity and familiarity of so many stories on the same themes, about the same people, and in the same styles: poignant and ironic glimpses of a moment in the life of an anguished teen, a distraught mom, a distressed writer, from Brooklyn, LA, Iowa City - you name it - and as a result when you make your selections you will be drawn toward something, anything!, that's a little different and unconventional, which (in part) explains why the Prize Stories include so many longer pieces broad in scope unlike what we read in most magazines and, in particular, why there are so many stories that take place outside the U.S./Canada, in fact not even about American ex-pats (a fairly familiar theme, and I plead guilty) but foreign cultures altogether. I'm no jingoist and anyone looking over my list of readings will see that I, too, turn to literature to get news of other cultures (and other times), but I would expect the O.Henry-PENs to have more news about what's going on in American life - isn't there something? The stories in the collection set abroad do include great ones, like William Trevor's "The Woman of the House," of course anything by Trevor could be in any anthology, but a few of the others seem much weaker and I wonder if they'd have made the cut were it not for the pseudo-exotic vocabulary and unconventional phrasings.